Nell Zink - Mislaid

Meg wrote to Karen saying she would be staying on the Eastern Shore as much as she could, but would be back to pick them up at Thanksgiving. Dee was handling fall break.

Karen wrote to her mother at least once a week, usually on Sunday mornings, but more often if something interesting happened. The squirrel sanctuary’s address was general delivery, so her letters went to the little post office in the nearest town and waited there to be picked up. Meg always sat down at the lunch counter at the five-and-dime across the street and wrote a reply right away, to save extra trips.

That was the sum total of their communication. It was not very communicative. Karen did not write that Temple was struggling to keep up with his course work, and Meg did not write that she was in love.

P arties at The University were considered a chance to blow off steam. To be three sheets to the wind and not show it: That was the ideal, attainable only by the most accomplished teen alcoholics. Visibly drunk: undesirable. Sober: geekdom (undesirable). Enter Temple and Karen.

It was Halloween, their first away from home. They had never seen middle-class trick-or-treaters in a town with houses. Charlottesville featured elaborate jack-o’-lanterns with real candles inside and wreaths of autumn leaves on doors. Halloween was aromatic and beautiful, and obviously as big a deal as Christmas. They were excited.

They surmised that in wild, uninhibited C’ville anything goes. Yet the costumes they chose were in doubtful taste by any standards. Temple wore a three-dollar thrift-shop suit of beige polyester gabardine from the seventies with wide lapels and no shirt. On his bare, hairless chest, Karen painted a large swastika in Wite-Out. Her costume was more or less the same, except that she wore her blue interview suit, while her swastika was in black Magic Marker on a T-shirt. On her feet were ratty gray Keds, her only shoes. There was a hole in the toe, but only on one side. Thus clad, they tasted a variety of miniaturized sweet cocktails at a progressive drinking party in Karen’s freshman dorm, telling anyone who asked that they were dressed as crypto-fascism.

It was Temple’s idea. It didn’t particularly make sense. But after eight weeks of self-imposed boot camp, he wasn’t expecting anyone ever again to notice anything he did. It was theater of the absurd, and its target audience was Karen. She was excessively amused. They collected stares and no comments of any kind, trawling the town and then the grounds for candy. At Temple’s request, they switched from saying “Trick or treat!” to singing “Here We Go a-Wassailing.”

Eventually they reached a brick mansion with a wraparound porch where there was clearly a party going on. They rang the doorbell. They swung their candy sacks from side to side in rhythm and started singing the song. A boy answered the door dressed as a wizard in a pointed hat and a long cape covered with stars. He gave them each a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and said, “So what are you? I mean, you’re obviously assimilationist self-hatred, like W. E. B. Du Bois, but what’s she?”

“She’s my shadow,” Temple said. It didn’t quite make sense, but Temple was not accustomed to having logical rigor enforced by anyone other than his conscience, and it had dozed off from exhaustion.

“Say, you guys want to come inside before somebody shoots you?”

The wizard opened the door on a room that was relatively quiet, relatively bright, and not the least bit smoky. There were many boys, and a few girls, sitting in costumes on sofas arranged in squares. Three boys were playing a complicated board game while others looked on and commented. A handsome boy stood in a corner of the huge room by the fireplace, one foot up on the hearth, playing a Violent Femmes song on a baritone ukulele.

“We’ll come inside for a little while,” Karen said.

She and Temple set their candy bags down in an armchair to reserve it and went looking for the bathroom. They worked their way toward the back of the house all the way to the kitchen but didn’t find it. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and found only bedrooms. They stood in the hallway looking confused, which is easy to do alone at a big party wearing swastikas, and were discovered there by the musician, who had come upstairs to put his ukulele away. It was Byrdie Fleming.

“What are you looking for?”

“The bathroom,” Karen said.

“You can go in my suite,” Byrdie said. “The bathrooms are all between bedrooms. You can’t get to them from the hallway.” He led them down the hall and opened a door. There were about ten people in the room, an odd smell Temple and Karen didn’t recognize, and on the coffee table a black brick of compressed Afghan hashish that had seen better days. A girl was prying shavings off it with a cake knife.

While Karen went to the bathroom, Temple sat down. The discussion in the room revolved around Friedrich Nietzsche. “He was a radical feminist,” a girl said. “That’s proof positive that something is wrong with radical feminism. He’s just like them. He thought women need to be radically different from the way they are.”

“He thought everybody needed to change radically,” Byrdie said. “Except him. So calling him a feminist because he hates women is like calling him a leftist because he hates the working class.” He turned to Temple and said, “You’re obviously a fascist. You explain it to them!”

“I just want everything to stay the way it is and then repeat itself,” Temple said. “I call it eternal recurrence. Then there’s no way out for any of us.”

“That’s exactly right,” Byrdie said. “You can’t claim you have some kind of critical outsider perspective just because you hate the situation you’re in.”

“There’s a way out if you call Cthulhu,” another boy said. “Cthulhu destroys your world, and then you can start over.”

“Which parts of this are my world?” Temple asked. “I’d hate to have Cthulhu destroy my world and then it turns out nothing’s changed except the parts that were mine. So I’m still sitting here talking to you, but, like, where’s my pants?” He looked down.

“What about your friend? She must be from your world. We never saw her before.”

“Me and Shadow don’t live in the same world,” Temple said. Then he looked embarrassed. “I mean, nobody shares a world. We all have our own worlds.”

“World views, ” Byrdie said. “I mean, it’s one world, but people have different perspectives on it. Otherwise I couldn’t change your world, and you couldn’t change mine. There’s advantages and disadvantages.”

Karen came out of the bathroom, occasioning a brief hush because you don’t see an outfit like that every day. Byrdie said, “Would you like a drink?”

“Maybe a beer,” Karen said. “I don’t really drink.”

“But by the way, I’ve been wanting to ask you,” Temple said. “Is that opium, or hashish?”

“It’s hash,” the Lovecraftian boy volunteered. “We burned through all our reefer this morning at the ounce blitz.”

“I’ve been fascinated by the topic of hashish ever since I read a certain masterpiece of black literature, The Count of Monte Cristo . And that was before I got turned on to Baudelaire.”

“My mom’s heavy into Baudelaire,” Karen explained, seeming embarrassed by Temple but not by her own mention of her mom.

“So I was just wondering, is it the kind you can eat?” Temple asked. “Because I don’t smoke. I mean, I tried smoking once, but I ended up coughing like crazy.”

“We were going to make brownies,” the girl with the cake knife said. “But we’re not getting very far. It’s hard as a rock.”